Sunday, July 26, 2009

article: "Too Many (Other) People"

As a left-leaning Rutgers law professor in the early 1970s, Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought that the Roe v. Wade abortion decision was the product of "concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations we don’t want too many of," she recalled in a recent New York Times Magazine interview.

Her expectation was that the purported right to abortion created in Roe "was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them."

Ginsburg doesn’t specify which parts of the human population "we" should cull, or how the creation of an abortion "right" would necessarily be a prelude to creation of a system in which abortion would be required in some circumstances. She told the Times that the question was effectively rendered moot by the Supreme Court's Harris v. McRae decision, which upheld a ban on Medicaid funding of abortion. That decision, handed down in 1980, indicated that her "perception" of the issue "had been altogether wrong," Ginsburg concludes.

But this means that there was an interval of roughly seven years during which Ginsburg, a well-informed and influential academic, believed that America was creating a eugenicist system in which abortion would help reduce "undesirable" populations – however those populations would be defined. This was what Roe had wrought, Ginsburg believed for several years, and if she ever experienced misgivings about it, she managed to keep them private.

Another question worth examining is this: Where did Ginsburg – a rising star in academe long before being tapped to fill the Rosa Klebb seat on the Supreme Court – get the impression that American policy-making elites were discussing the use of welfare subsidies to bring about the attrition of "undesirable" populations?

If I may be permitted a modest venture in speculation, I’d suggest that Ginsburg, sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, became at least superficially acquainted with the writings of John Holdren or of like-minded people in the most militant branch of the population control movement.